Friday, December 9, 2011

Fresno Zionism visits David Kleins' CSU Northridge webpage

"Freedom of speech implies that a government-funded institution may not deny someone the right to speak except in some narrowly-circumscribed cases. But it does not imply that the institution must be required to provide a megaphone, in the form of a university supported web server, to practice slander and defamation."Fresno Zionism

"A Mathematics professor at California State University, Northridge, David Klein, maintains one of the ugliest hate-Israel pages I’ve seen in some time. For example:

Israel is the most racist state in the world at this time

Zionism calls for a Jewish state. Israel defines Jewishness, in part, in genetic terms. A person is legally Jewish if his or her mother is Jewish, regardless of place of birth or religious belief. Israel is an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against the indigenous population, enforcing, for example, Jewish-only buses and Jewish-only roads. The result of Israeli state policies has been a 60 year program of ethnic cleansing, including expulsion of the Palestinian population, military occupation, and mass murder.

Everything in the above paragraph is false except “Zionism calls for a Jewish state,” and even then his understanding of ‘Jewish state’ is wrong. There are links (which I didn’t reproduce) to other anti-Zionist sites like counterpunch.org, the “Campaign to end Israeli Apartheid,” “Electronic Intifada,” etc. which are supposed to support his statements.

This page and several others (including one defending former academic and “Holocaust Industry” author Norman Finkelstein) are linked to Klein’s main Mathematics Department page.

The AMCHA initiative complained to the University, calling Klein’s page antisemitic and demanding its removal. The University President, Jolene Koester, responded that a review showed that there were no violations of University web use policies and that “the conclusions are based on the important tenets of academic freedom and free speech, which are central to the values and traditions of academia and, indeed, a democratic society.”